“Suburgatory” picked up for a full first season

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Based on the audience for the first three episodes, ABC’s new show Suburgatory has been renewed for a full first season. The number of viewers for the first three episodes has been impressive: 9.81 million, 9.11 million, and 8.92 million.

I haven’t had a chance to see an episode yet – perhaps its popularity is really due to the fact that it offers something new? It does have a nice time slot between The Middle and Modern Family. Interestingly though, Episode 3 had a 3.1 rating, slightly higher than The Middle (2.9 rating) but below Modern Family (5.9 rating). Episode 4 airs tonight.

Chicken regulations in Naperville

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More suburbs have had to deal with this issue in recent years: should suburbanites be allowed to keep chickens? Here is the latest from Naperville:

The majority of Naperville council members voted Tuesday to make no changes to an existing ordinance that governs the keeping of fowl in the city, which states the birds must be kept 25 feet from neighboring homes and cleaned regularly.

City staff presented a proposal Tuesday that would place further regulation on chicken coop keepers, requiring them to obtain a permit for the birds and construct larger perimeters around the livestock. But council members opted to maintain the status quo that has regulated chicken ownership for years…

While both residents — neighbors, in fact — who spoke during public forum were on opposite sides of the fence on the issue, they agreed the council’s decision came as a surprise…

But the council’s decision has no effect on those who live in subdivisions, some of which have their own bylaws that govern the keeping of livestock.

While the article suggests at the end that there are only a few formal complaints about this a year, I suspect this is an issue that will continue to pop up. This is a classic NIMBY issue: will nearby property values decrease if a neighbor keeps chickens? It is also interesting to note that Naperville’s guidelines don’t apply to subdivisions, presumably because they have Homeowner’s Associations that already tackle this issue. (Naperville has an unusual number of HOAs – noted builder Harold Moser helped pioneer this in the city.)

This reminds me of My Blue Heaven, a study of the working class Los Angeles suburb of South Gate. In the early days of this suburb, it was common for residents to own animals and build their own homes. I suspect this sort of activity would not go over well in more middle or upper class suburbs.

If you are curious, here is what Naperville’s municipal code says about “fowl and livestock”:

1. Housing: All fowl and livestock shall be kept within a pen, coop, building or other enclosure sufficient in size and strength to confine such animals to the owner’s property, except that livestock may be tethered securely to a fixed object outside the enclosure, but only if the animal is so confined to the owner’s property.

2. Zoning: Fowl and livestock may be kept in any area in the City except as otherwise provided by this Chapter or the City’s Zoning Ordinance.

3. Restrictions:

3.1. No livestock shall be kept, housed, maintained or pastured within a distance of two hundred (200) feet of any occupied residence other than that of the owner.

3.2. No pen, coop, building or other enclosure used for the purpose of housing fowl (with the exception of homing pigeons) shall be erected or maintained within twenty-five (25) feet of any occupied residence other than that of the owner.

3.3. Every person maintaining a pen, coop, building, yard or enclosure for fowl or livestock shall keep such area clean, sanitary and free from all refuse. Such areas shall be thoroughly swept at least once every twenty-four (24) hours and the dirt and refuse shall be disposed in a clean and sanitary fashion.

3.4. All feed for fowl or livestock shall be kept in containers that are rodent-proof until put out for consumption of fowl or livestock.

Another report suggests Naperville is somewhat unusual in not regulating this issue more closely:

Homeowners on both sides of Laird’s Rivanna Court property are urging the Naperville City Council to re-examine a decades-old city law that puts no limits on the number of chickens one can have, as long as the pen is cleaned once every 24 hours and is kept at least 25 feet from neighboring homes.

Naperville is one of a few municipalities — including St. Charles, Batavia, Oak Park and Chicago — that allow residents, with a few conditions, to raise chickens at home. But in an email to council members, Laird’s neighbors stressed the city is “no longer a rural farming community but residential with nice homes and smaller backyards.”

I wonder if this is one of those issues in Naperville where formal regulations are unnecessary as social pressure would keep too many people from having chickens. One resident in the story suggests that his chicken coop was opened at night by others. I would guess that could be a lot of disapproving glances and talk if someone started building a chicken house.

American Academy of Pediatrics: television has no positive effects on children under two

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Here is a new recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics about children under two watching TV:

Their verdict: It’s not good, and probably bad.

Media, whether playing in the background or designed explicitly as an infant educational tool, “have potentially negative effects and no known positive effects for children younger than 2 years,” concluded the AAP’s report, released Oct. 18 at the Academy’s annual meeting in Boston and scheduled for November publication in the journal Pediatrics. “Although infant/toddler programming might be entertaining, it should not be marketed as or presumed by parents to be educational.”…

As screens proliferated, so did research. “There have been about 50 studies that have come out on media use by children in this age group between 1999 and now,” said Ari Brown, a pediatrician and member of the AAP committee that wrote the new report…

Three studies since 1999 have tracked educational television use and language development, and they found a link between increased TV time and developmental delays. Whether that’s a cause or effect — parents who leave kids in front of televisions might simply be poor teachers — isn’t clear, nor are the long-term effects, but the AAP called the findings “concerning.” In the same vein, there may also be a link to attention problems.

Several thoughts about this:

1. This article suggests researchers have found a correlation, not necessarily causation. But since researchers have not found any positive effects, they must feel confident in issuing this recommendation.

2. Does research suggest that television has some positive effects for children over two years old? Overall, are there studies that suggest television has positive effects for adults?

3. What does this do for children’s programs and videos? What about all of those “Baby Einstein” videos? Will new cottage industries spring up to fill this void?

Not just one national housing recovery

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National figures about the housing market give us an idea of what is happening across the United States. But if all real estate is local, it might be worthwhile to remember that the housing recovery may or may not be happening at different rates in different regions.

It would be interesting to hear housing experts talk about what this means for attempted national policies regarding housing. Would national policies take care of what needs to be done in Fresno, California and also Detroit, Michigan?

Lord Giddens as “Blair guru”

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I occasionally run across stories involving Anthony Giddens, well-known sociologist, speaking about political issues in Britain. Here is another example of the actions of the “Blair guru”:

Labour peer Lord Giddens, who brought the debate on 13 October entitled Universities: Impact of Government Policy, said ministers appeared to be pursuing policies of “ill-considered, untutored radicalism” that were not based in proper research and had “imponderable outcomes”.

The academic, who advised former prime minister Tony Blair and is professor of sociology at LSE, said the reforms would leave England as a “global outrider” with one of the lowest levels of public support for higher education in the industrialised world.

He said the “ideological thrust” of the Browne Review should have been rejected and instead tuition fees only gradually raised alongside the maintenance of direct public support for universities, due to their “massive” beneficial impact on society.

“Universities are not a sort of supermarket where education can be chosen like a washing powder off the shelf. Students are not simply consumers, making day-to-day purchasing decisions. They will make a one-off decision,” he said.

Reading these stories, it seems like Giddens has more political clout than most sociologists. Is this simply a function of having been close to Tony Blair, did Giddens do specific work/research that put him in contact with politicians, or does Britain simply have a different culture regarding public intellectuals and how sociologists can be involved in social and government life?

Finding new ways to store your bike in the city

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With space at a premium in many cities, some people have developed innovative ways to store bicycles:

Fortunately some cities have responded to the challenge with exceptional ingenuity. Japanese engineers have developed a multi-level “cycle tree” — perhaps more appropriately named a “cycle cave” — that stores bikes in an elaborate underground system. Riders feed their bike into a mechanized rut that sends it down into a designated spot, retrieving the bike later with a simple swipe of a card. One “cycle tree” in Tokyo, considered the world’s largest, holds some 6,500 bikes.

A truer bike tree can be found in Geneva, where riders can watch their bike raised high above the hands of thieves while remaining protected from the elements. In that same anti-theft vein, German designers have created a bike lock with inline wheels and a small motor that enables riders to power their bikes high up a street pole. Seoul, Korea, is working toward a system of bike hangers that cling to the site of residential buildings; riders can park for just $15 a year, though they have to pedal to retrieve their bike. A slightly less advanced version of this concept has been implemented already by some riders in the East Village…

Those who don’t mind cramming their bikes into their apartments have a growing number of options as well. These range from basic wooden wall mounts to simple, cheap wall hooks to stylish, colorful hanging nodes to elegant bike storage furniture that, in the words of Freshome, “unite cycling culture with interior design.” A Times slideshow from a few years back showcases some other space-saving solutions. These include a wall device that lifts bikes off the ground with a hydraulic spring, a freestanding rack made of oak, an incredibly compact and sleek wall hook, and a similar structure that, while bulkier, provides space for helmets and other equipment.

Many city dwellers, conscious of their limited apartment space, are now looking for bike storage devices that serve a double purpose. Knife & Saw recently introduced a hanging bike shelf that also acts as a small bookshelf. Less costly variations are starting to appear as well. Those with a balcony might consider a bike-shelf-birdhouse combination that holds a helmet as easily as it holds a helmetshrike. The most innovative, though perhaps also the least comfortable, design goes to Store Muu Design Studio, which conceived a sort of hybrid bike-desk, wherein the bike seat doubles as the office chair.

Some fascinating pictures to look at. You can even find out a little more about what happened to the foldable bicycle.

Home buyers looking for McMansion features

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I’ve highlighted the trend toward granite countertops and stainless steel appliances and here is some more evidence of home buyers looking for McMansion features, this time in the Philadelphia area:

Two couples I know are trying to sell city houses they have owned for more than three decades. The houses are historic, and conventional wisdom when they bought them as shells was to restore them without compromising their architectural integrity.

They bought them when they were young, raised their families in them, and now they are ready to move on.

One couple have had their house on the market since April. One of the owners told me prospective buyers seem to want marble bathrooms and gourmet kitchens, which are more suburban McMansion phenomena than urban trends.

“They can go to the home center and get those things,” she said, blaming TV reality shows for the attitude.

Today’s numbers reflect an impasse: Few people are buying, and those who do are paying bottom dollar; most sellers aren’t willing to take less.

Buyers want the best features but want the cheaper price while home sellers have to wrestle with not spending too much money to update in a down market when housing values have dropped.

Can we solely blame TV reality shows for this phenomenon? Here are three other reasons this might be happening:

1. Tastes have gone up and people expect better features in their home. This isn’t just from reality TV: advertising plays a role (similar pitches from the 1950s to today) as do reference groups.

2. More than in the past, home owners don’t have the home repair skills or will to do these repairs. Therefore, they want the sellers to have done this work for them and then don’t want to have to deal with it for a while.

3. It is a buyer’s market and so buyers tend to ask for everything. Many home sellers don’t have much leverage.

Ten ways to bring about more open/park space to Chicago

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After a report last week that Chicago was lacking in open space compared to other major American cities, architecture critic Blair Kamin proposes ten ways that Chicago could help rectify the problem:

The open space shortage is pervasive, with 32 of 77 community areas, home to half of Chicago’s 2.7 million people, failing to meet the city’s own modest requirement of two acres of open space for every 1,000 residents. And the stakes associated with relieving it are huge. Parks can help the city’s neighborhoods attract and retain residents, promote public health, boost real estate values and draw together people from different walks of life…

Although Emanuel has thrown his support behind a grab bag of open space initiatives, such as boathouses on the Chicago River and a new park in an unused area of Rosehill Cemetery, he has yet to produce the visionary plan he promised in his transition report.

In the absence of such a vision, here are 10 ideas that show what architects and the architects of public policy can do to relieve Chicago’s chronic open space shortage.

There are some interesting ideas here and many sounds relatively simply to institute.

When I saw the earlier story, I had a thought: should people have a right to public space? In the suburbs, perhaps this doesn’t matter as much as the common American goal is to purchase your own land. But in the city, where the population density increases and residents expect to be outside of their dwelling, should people have a guaranteed amount of public space? Do people have a human right to parks, to open land?

This question also is pertinent in light of the Occupy Wall Street protestors in Zuccotti Park in New York City. This is a weird sort of public space: it is privately owned but the owners have an agreement with the city to operate it as public space. This sort of arrangement is spreading to other cities: San Francisco has a number “privately owned public spaces” (POPOS) that few residents or tourists would ever know are actually privately owned. This might be helpful in that cities don’t have to do all the maintenance for these spaces but what happens when the private owners don’t like what is taking place on supposedly public property?

How to rank the luckiest cities in the United States

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Perhaps we have taken these rankings lists too far: Men’s Health has ranked the luckiest cities in the United States.

Luck is like that dark matter stuff scientists have spent billions of dollars trying to find with the Large Hadron Collider—a powerful presence that people surmise exists but no one has actually seen. The difference is that we found luck. Using statistics instead of protons, we pinpointed the location of a large supply in, of all places, San Diego.

Wondering how Vegas didn’t hit this jackpot? Here’s our definition of good luck: the most winners of Powerball, Mega Millions, and Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes; most hole-in-ones (PGA); fewest lightning strikes (including the fatal kind) and deaths from falling objects (Vaisala Inc., National Climatic Data Center, CDC); and least money lost on lottery tickets and race betting (Bureau of Labor Statistics).

San Diego is number one on the list with Baltimore, Phoenix, Wilmington (Delaware), and Richmond rounding out the top five. Chicago is #36. The bottom five: Sioux Falls, Memphis, Jackson (Mississippi), Tampa, and Charleston (West Virginia).

What I like about this is that they are straightforward with what factors went into the rankings (though they might have been weighted). These are what we might consider “very rare” and cultural conditioned lucky events. The lottery is perhaps the poster child for this. If someone wins more than once, some suspicions might surface (see a story about a four-time Texas winner here). What about lesser luck, such as avoiding a car accident at the last minute or local sports teams coming up with miraculous plays at the end of a game or avoiding natural disasters? Such things would be much more difficult to measure and it might always be an open statistical question of whether strange occurrences could be explained by some other unmeasured or unknown factor.

Should anyone move to the luckier cities to really improve their chances? No, the statistical odds of any of these things happening is still quite small. In fact, it would be interesting to see how much really separates the luckiest cities from the unluckiest – are we talking a difference of 1 in a million? Ten in a million?

In the end, I think these rankings don’t really tell us much about anything. People shouldn’t use them as a guide and measuring luck is fraught with difficulty. Take the lottery winnings: could this simply reflect the fact that people in certain cities buy more tickets or their states have bigger lottery jackpots which encourages more participation? This is a story that uses real numbers to make a nebulous point in order to gain website clicks (guilty as charged) and sell magazines.

The widespread (yet sometimes controversial) use of tax rebates for development in Illinois

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It is common practice in Illinois for communities to give tax rebates to firms and companies to locate within their community. The primary reason: it ends up bringing in more sales tax revenue.

Communities throughout the region and the state share sales tax revenues to woo retailers — and they are within their rights to do so under Illinois law. In fact, rebate researcher Geoffrey Propheter found the rebate programs to be more heavily used in Illinois than elsewhere around the country.

For the most part, these programs have flown under the radar until this summer, when the Regional Transportation Authority, the city of Chicago and Cook County legally challenged a variation on their use. In lawsuits, they alleged Channahon and Kankakee used sales tax rebate agreements to divert sales tax collections unfairly from metro Chicago to small “sham offices” in their lower-tax towns — allegations denied by both communities.

With a spotlight now directed at sales-tax rebate programs, some observers are quick to say they stand behind the more common use of rebate programs to attract big-box stores and auto dealers…

But other observers say the programs can skew economic development efforts toward retail. This can be effective in filling city coffers but may not produce as much regional economic growth as office or manufacturing developments, which tend to have higher-paying jobs and an ability to sell products over a much wider geographic range.

The rebate programs also tend to foster bidding wars between towns, with taxpayers picking up the tab. Propheter, a research assistant at the George Washington Institute of Public Policy, found the rebate offers have been used in border skirmishes around the state, from Belleville, outside St. Louis, to southwest suburban Joliet.

This is not a new story: states and communities across the United States have been engaging in such battles for years. In most places, governments are looking out for themselves and have little incentive to participate in regional planning or cooperation. Particularly today, in an era when many municipalities are desperate to find some extra money, providing incentives for developments likely looks attractive.

It would be interesting to know why this has become such a popular tool in Illinois.

Critics of sprawl argue that this helps feed sprawl. Communities look for ways to bring in easy money and big box stores and strip malls are relatively cheap to build. It is also interesting to see what happens when sprawl moves past these communities and the big box stores become less attractive and the new ones are even further out from the city. Shopping malls and big box stores tend not to age well.

Several examples of this come to mind:

1. Some of the verbal back-and-forth between Illinois and several other states, including Wisconsin, Indiana, and New Jersey, over the increasing tax rate in Illinois and casino revenues.

2. The story of how the Fox Valley Mall came to be in Aurora. The story is that the developer played Aurora and Naperville off each other in order to get a better deal for developing land on either the east or west side of Illinois Route 59. Naperville was not as willing to negotiate – and things were looking relatively good for them with the relocation of Bell Labs and a Amoco research facility along I-88 in the 1960s – and the developer picked Aurora. Naperville knew that it had lost a significant source of revenue. To compensate, city leaders turned quickly to drawing up plans to revitalize their downtown, putting into action a plan that suggested building a park along the river (put together a few years later as the Riverwalk), grouping municipal buildings in the downtown (new City Hall, new downtown library), and beautifying some of the streets (see Jefferson Avenue and Jackson Avenue between Main Street and Washington Street). I wonder how the story would be told today in Naperville if their downtown hadn’t become a destination.